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It has been very interesting to watch our Chinese social media channel mature.  Clearly, we have some of the same trends seen by Western social media sites but we also have some unique factors impacting on our developing social media and this has taken our market on a different trajectory.  Currently, we are experiencing a surge in growth of the Sina's Microblogging platform, an increased emphasis on real-time search and gaming widgets. Plus, there is significant uptake in the use of social media monitoring tools (although I think we will look back and be embarrassed at the simplicity of the current platforms). And most notably, their is general acknowledgment that social media is more than just a passing fad, with broad adoption by all major marketers in China.

Here are some predictions for what Chinese social media will look like in 2012 (note: there is a great list of Western social media predictions on Ad Age).

1. Chinese Government Restrictions
The impact of Chinese Government regulation and content moderation will result in a consolidation of the two Internet model- the "Chinese" and the "rest of the world" Internet. This is the leading catalyst for defining changes between the social media approaches within China and outside China.

2. Social Commerce (s-commerce)
This is an concept that people are talking about now but I think it will become a reality in 2012. A taobao come renren platform is used to drive online purchases - community reviews, group buying and exclusive community deals are done to argument more traditional sales channels.

3. Chinese Search 
With the departure of Google, many of the aspirational Chinese search engines are rallying to fill this gap. It would be possible to see at least one of these engines take a different angel to Baidu and push more real-time information, e.g. from Sina microblogging where we get results and user reviews. This social search engine can push relevant content from our personal networks to the front of search results, making them more personalized.

4. Reduction in number of SNS
The number of Social media sites in China will reduce; either from being under-funded, failing to build an audience or simply being acquired and rolled up. I would expect a number of new vertical SNS to appear but fundamentally see the more established ones continuing to dominate and expand their offerings.

5. Social Media Tools
We are seeing the first generation of social media tools in China. However, there is only a handful of enterprise scale tools (SinoTech's SinoBuzz, Ogivy's Obuzz and Nielsen BuzzMetrics) that can monitor and automatically determine sentiment of Chinese Internet content. Into next year these platform's need to evolve to support analysis of users, authors and predictability of viralness.

6. Influencer marketing will be redefined
I agree with Freddie Laker on this one. We both accept that as social media continues to permeate more and more aspects of not only the way we interact with digital media but also other channels such as digital outdoor, commerce or online TV, we will see the significance of influencer marketing grow dramatically. As a basic example, the inclusion of twitter in Google or Sina Microblog in their Soso search results or Google's soon-to-be-released Social Search will permeate search results with content that will not be managed by Google's infamous PageRank but by social influence and relevance to your social network. Discovering people that can help you to reach your desired consumer will become exponentially more effective and important.

7. Ratings everywhere
Chinese content everywhere will have sharing, commenting and ratings.

8. Social media agents
Many brands will not be able to support internal social meda teams, technologies nor understand the kind of investments needed in preparing solid campaigns and social media approaches and have turned to their Agencies. However, most Agencies have yet to develop core competencies in this area.... I propose  we will see a wave of Chinese business offering to support Brands beyond their 4A advertising relationships. 4A Agencies will need to address this to remain relevant to their clients and passing this activity to a 3rd party will not be acceptable to most Chinese brands. Although MMC's should be less concerned with this business practice and more concerned with the outcome.

9. Microblogging becomes mainstream
We saw this in the West when Twitter went mainstream and saw hypergrowth. Sina microblogging is gaining critical mass with users and many brands are starting to respond to this by exhibiting their sina microblogging handle with the view of growing their following.

10. Mobile becomes a social media extension
Many leaders I talk with complain of their employees playing "Farmville" or chatting online... to combat this hit in productivity, they are instigating no SNS zones and timeout periods...  but with many Chinese developing digital addictions with mobile phones and using social media it is easy to imagine the traditional "cigarette breaks" in 2012 being a "social media break". This past-time has now become many Chinese consumers' favorite social drug of choice.